Allow people to do sudo apt-get build-dep without any further configuration

[Ciro Santilli 六四事件 法轮功]

Or provide a reliable CLI method, a direct sed on /etc/atp/sources.list does not feel clean.

Motivation: https://askubuntu.com/questions/496549/error-you-must-put-some-source-uris-in-your-sources-list

This is specially important for Docker, but also a big annoyance on desktop, as there is no clean CLI way of enabling it.

Why not just enable by default and save people the trouble?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Tambellini (william-tambellini)]

Just confirming the annoyance/source of bugs/misunderstanding of doing such:
sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list~
sudo sed -Ei 's/^# deb-src /deb-src /' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Should probably be

  add-apt-repository deb-src

?

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Enabling by default does not make much sense and people usually use pull-lp-source instead which does not need sources.list entries and pulls directly from launchpad.

[Lin Manfu (linmanfu)]

@Julian Andres Klode:

 If I understand pull-lp-source's man page correctly, pull-lp-source is not at all a substitute for apt-get build-dep. The latter will install *and update* the relevant source code, so that your dependencies are as secure as the rest of the repository. The former provides a one-off download of the source code. You will not automatically be provided with fixes for that code.